Numbers For Data Junkies
By: Drew Meyers, Business Development Specialist | November 16, 2006
With over 67 million homes in our database, you can say we love data. We thrive on it. As you can imagine, many Zillow employees are data "junkies" and love to analyze as much data as possible. I’m one of those junkies. Yesterday, I dug through some of our site reports and found some interesting data regarding the number of unique homes that have been viewed on Zillow.
I was amazed to discover that roughly 27 million unique home details pages have been viewed, which means nearly 40% of the homes in our database have been viewed at least once! Yowza.
In King County, WA, which happens to be where our Zillow offices are located, 80% of the roughly 560,000 unique homes have been viewed on Zillow. Which makes me wonder: Have 80% of homeowners in King County been to our site or is this mostly due to folks in the real estate biz researching multiple properties? Here are the runners-up in terms of counties with the highest percentage of unique homes viewed on Zillow:
- 80% - Norfolk, MA and Marin, CA
- 78% - San Mateo, CA and Middlesex, MA
- 76% - Snohomish, WA
The largest county in the United States — Los Angeles — comes in at #13 on the list at 72%. Of the 1.9 million Los Angeles County homes in our database, over 1.375 million have been viewed, which is pretty impressive.
- Stumble it!
- Categories: Real Estate Analytics, Real Estate Industry, Zillow
Comments
6 Comments so far
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Joachim on November 16, 2006 10:22 am
Are you sure that these “views” are people, and not machines?
Those numbers seem fantastical to me.
Drew M from Zillow on November 16, 2006 1:48 pm
Joachim-
Thanks for your comment. It is certainly a valid question. Our operations team have anti-scraping measures in place and shut off IP’s in violation of our TOU. While we may not catch 100% of violators, we think these figures pretty accurately represent real people viewing home details pages. We are certainly pleasantly surprised with reaching this many users.
Michael on November 16, 2006 2:14 pm
I am in the real estate biz working as a loan officer. I used Zillow to check values 2 to 3 times a week. Now my company IP has been shut off from Zillow. Why? Can you turn it back on?
David G from Zillow.com on November 16, 2006 4:58 pm
Michael -
Thanks for letting us know (and for confirming for Joachim that we’re moderating excessive use of the site).
Your webmaster should have received an e-mail notification from our network administrators with the heads up that we were blocking access to the site and with instruction on how to avoid this. Please check this with your webmaster and if they have that communication, please ask them to respond.
If not, please just send me an e-mail [davidg at zillow] with your IP address and I’ll follow up.
Joachim on November 17, 2006 6:08 am
Well I have no doubt that Zillow is a great service, and that it is a basic instinct of everyone who hears about it to zillow their whole neighborhood.
The numbers just seem crazy to me. For example, in LA, there is probably a relatively large percentage of rental properties. These are much less likely to be viewed for the Zestimate. And the CAPTCHA challenge and anti-scraping checks probably keep people from using it too much for commercial purposes (like to get at tax assessment).
Don’t get me wrong, I love zillow; it is like crack for people like me, but I just don’t buy it.
But I’ve been wrong before. I really thought Kerry, and before that, Gore, were going to win…
David G from Zillow.com on November 17, 2006 12:09 pm
Joachim -
About a third of single family residences are rentals. But, rental properties have owners too :-); and they’re real estate investors who are even more passionate than the average owner is about house values. Likewise, many rental properties house potential first-time buyers who are very active Zillow users. In researching what they can afford, renters will often start with their rental’s Zestimate. Rental properties probably have a larger audience on Zillow than most other houses do.
We’ve also been pleasantly surprised by Zillow’s popularity — and we know how to spot (and stop) automated eyeballs — these numbers are, for the most part, visits by real people.
BTW, I hope your vote was more succesful this year